PhD Managerial Science and Applied Economics, The Wharton
School, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Biography and
Research

Dr.
Helena Szrek is a researcher at the Centre for Finance and Economics at the
University of Porto, in Portugal. She specializes in judgment and
decision making with two different focuses, (i)
analyzing the choice processes of consumers (especially health care
consumers) and (ii) the link between health and entrepreneurship. She also
has a strong interest in data collection methodologies.

Her research has been published in internationally known
journals across different disciplines including public health, psychology,
economics, and entrepreneurship. Dr. Szrek’s
research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health,
the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology, Stanford University’s
Center for Advancing Decision Making on Aging, University of Pennsylvania’s
Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, and University of Pennsylvania’s
Population Studies Center/Penn Aging ResearchCenter/Boettner Center for Pension
Research.

Choice processes
of consumers

At the core of Dr. Szrek’s research on
choice is the idea that any strategies implemented by companies or government
must consider the needs and abilities of the individual, as well as the
specific context in which he/she is making decisions. Small changes in the
environment (ex. characteristics of the store in which products are
purchased, characteristics of the product itself, and/or of the purchasing
process) will affect different individuals in distinct ways, resulting in
different purchase patterns. Hence, across much of her current work, she is
trying to understand how the “choice architecture” or design of the
environment and product that individuals are choosing will differentially
influence purchasing decisions, depending on individual cognitive capacities
and needs.

Some of the contexts she has studied include cell phone choice
(Szrek and Martins, Under Review), purchase of children’s health insurance
(Szrek and Bundorf, Under Preparation), purchase of
subsidized health insurance by older adults (Bundorf
and Szrek, 2010; Szrek and Bundorf, 2011, Szrek and
Bundorf, 2014), design of employee workplace
wellness programs (Szrek, Geyster et al., Under Review),
and adoption of new digital technologies (Otero and Szrek, Under
Preparation).

Health and
Entrepreneurship

Dr. Szrek is currently investigating the roles of health and
decision processes on the evolution of businesses in developing countries. In
past work, Szrek and colleagues have analyzed how the poor health of
business owners can lead to the closure of businesses (Chao, Pauly, Szrek, et al., 2007), how the good health of
business owners can lead to the opening of new businesses (Chao, Szrek et
al., 2010), and how the pursuit of investment opportunities by small business
owners is related to their time preferences (Chao, Szrek, et al., 2009).

Building on these studies, Szrek and colleagues are
analyzing the relationship between health and business ownership using more
rigorous methodologies that utilize three years of longitudinal data with a
larger sample size, coupled with infrastructure data, health and HIV
biomarkers of respondents, and more complete measures of entrepreneurial
activity and success (Chao, Szrek, et al., 2012).

Current and future work considers the effects of HIV on
businesses. HIV prevalence is about 11-12% in South Africa, but rates are as
high as 30-40% in some townships. It is unclear how such high prevalence
affects HIV+ individuals, especially in terms of their ability to get jobs
and run businesses. Another area of future work is to better understand how
fundamental preferences such as risk aversion and loss aversion affect the
inter-relationship between entrepreneurial activity and health investments.

Although these studies are currently focused in South
Africa, the findings are pertinent to economic policy in other countries.
Entrepreneurship is a growing but relatively young field, and it is
under-researched overall and in many areas. In particular, entrepreneurship
is much less studied in developing countries, and the link to health has
been, so far, mostly overlooked.

Teaching

Dr. Helena Szrek’s teaching has
included undergraduate, graduate, and executive courses in different areas of
marketing, management, and health care. She has taught at the Faculty of
Economics of the University of Porto and the School of Business and Economics
of the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon.